Lt. Yendry Velázquez, 36, widow of a Venezuelan soldier murdered during last year’s guarimbas, confronts Lilian Tintori outside the Americas Summit in Panama City. “Your husband is still living, mine is dead thanks to yours,” she says.
And that’s not the only outrage going down at the forum right now. Here’s a backgrounder, via Aporrea:
Members of the Committee of Victims of the Guarimbas clashed on Thursday in Panama with Lilian Tintori, wife of Leopoldo López, leader of the ultra-right party, Voluntad Popular (“Popular Will”) and intellectual author of the fascist activities which took place in Venezuela between February and May 2014.
According to Telesur, while Tintori was outside the forum parallel to the Summit of the Americas, agitating for the freeing of her husband, victims’ families were not allowed to participate in this activity, even though their accreditation had been previously confirmed.
February 12, 2015 marked the one-year anniversary of the demonstration known as “La Salida” (The Exit), a putschist plan activated by the Venezuelan far-right and supported by the US government, whose objective was to undermine peace and institutional order in Venezuela. During the violence that followed, 43 persons died and 878 were injured.
Translation mine.
And speaking of fascists and outrage, get a load of who else was roaming free in Panama City, much to the disgust of HIS victims:
The children of Argentine-Cuban guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara rejected the presence of Félix Rodríguez Mentigutía in Panama City on Thursday, at the summit of the Americas. Rodríguez, 73, a former Cuban agent of the CIA, was a key participant in the capture and killing of their father in Bolivia in October 1967.
“One might forget the past and present of one who has not stopped boasting of having lent his services toward imprisoning and later killing Che Guevara in Bolivia. Perhaps those who invited them or organized the symposium didn’t know that he was and is a servile slave of the Yankee powers,” reads a note published in Havana. The note was signed by Aleida, Celia, Camilo and Ernesto Guevara March.
In the late 1980s, Rodríguez wrote a memoir, Shadow Warrior, in which he tells of the CIA’s operations in Latin America and of the final hours of Che. Rodríguez has publicly acknowledged that he ordered the Bolivian soldiers to kill Guevara and appears in a photo alongside him after he was captured.
An official delegation of Cuban civil society members travelled to Panama to participate in parallel forums, and to denounce the presence of Rodríguez and “dissidents”, whom they accused of being Washington’s mercenaries. On Thursday, Cuban television transmitted images of a violent clash between Cubans of both delegations, who were separated by Panamanian police.
Translation, again, mine.
This is going to prove extremely awkward for His Barackness, in light of the much-vaunted defrosting of Cuban-US relations. Not only because old CIA assassins are apparently roaming free in Panama, but also because so are the putschists who are trying to destabilize Cuba’s greatest ally (and architect of all the improved inter-American relations), Venezuela.
And just to add to the awkwardness, those putschists are the forces in Venezuela with which Obama’s government has stupidly decided to align itself. Yes, that’s right…they’re favoring blatant lawbreakers, fascists and violent assassins, over democratically elected, popular socialist leaders. In other words, business as usual for the US government.
If I were Raúl Castro, I’d have an awful lot of trouble keeping a civil tongue in my head. After all, Che was his and Fidel’s dear friend, way back in the day. And Nicolás Maduro, whom Washington’s toadies keep trying to topple, IS their friend, here and now.